Authors: Matilde Asensi
I sighed, feeling a growing wave of desperation as I watched her advance through the halls like the Titanic toward the ice. Even when I saw her gaze on my neck, and her image in the screen told me she was directly behind me in the doorway, I still held onto the useless hope that she would go another way and disappear.
“Might I ask what you’re doing at this hour?” she rebuked me, moving a little farther into the room and stopping in front of the screen where she could see herself, hands on her hips, in the green nightshirt, her hair sticking up, with a look of irritation on her face. “And might I ask why you’re spying? I don’t remember having taught you to spy when you were little!”
“I’m reading.”
“Reading?” She asked, indignant. “You just wait, in the end I’ll have to do what I did when you were ten! Turn off the light or I’ll turn it off for you!”
I laughed. “Then I’ll just turn on a flashlight, like I did then.”
She smiled as well. “You think I didn’t know?” she asked, drawing up a chair and making herself comfortable; the night was lost. “I still remember the batteries, wires, and those tiny bulbs you used to use to make flashlights to read with under the covers. You know your brother copied the idea from you? When we lived in London and you were in school at La Salle, he would do the same, except that you read comics and he read real books. He was so smart for his age…!” Have I already mentioned that Daniel was my mother’s favorite son? “Chaucer, Thomas Malory, Milton, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonathan Swift, Byron, Keats….”
“Come on, Mom. I’ve always known how intelligent my brother is.”
For her, culture was reduced to the field of the humanities. What I did had never achieved the category of “respectable,” and, of course, would never be anything other than an adolescent pastime. My mother thought more highly of a cobbler or a house painter than of me; at least the cobbler and the painter did something useful. Of course, from that perspective, Daniel always came out ahead: anthropologist, professor at the university, scholar, with a wife and an adorable son. What title did I have? What was this internet thing? Why was I still unmarried and uncommitted? Why didn’t I give her grandchildren? On her last visit she had made it very clear that, for all the money I had, I would always be the biggest failure of her life, and I got the impression she was about to repeat that disagreeable commentary at that very moment.
“You have to do something at once, Arnie,” she affectionately reproached me. “You absolutely cannot keep this up. You’re already thirty-five years old. You’re a man, and it’s time to make important decisions. Clifford and I have thought of making out a will…Yes, I know it’s still early, but Clifford is very determined, and I, obviously, am not going to refuse. That would
be silly, don’t you think? I’m telling you because we’ve thought of giving Daniel a larger part than you…. I hope it doesn’t bother you, darling. He doesn’t have as many resources as you have, and you know professors don’t make much money. Besides, he has a son, and probably will have more because both he and Ona are still young. So….”
“It doesn’t matter to me, mom,” I agreed, convinced. What else could I do? Besides, from what I knew, my mother had been helping him for a long time with small amounts of money every month and paying the mortgage on the house on Xiprer Street. I took it as a given that my brother would receive more than I, although I couldn’t help but see Clifford behind the whole thing. Clifford was a good man and we both appreciated each other, but Daniel was his son and I was not. In any case, I fortunately did not need the money, and my brother, whether or not he recovered, could always use it.
“Naturally, if you had children, this question wouldn’t even have come up. For us, both of you are exactly equal. You know that Clifford loves you. But, of course, while you remain single, there’s no question. In any case, we aren’t going to die, of course. Not yet. Now…, I’ll tell you another thing: If, in a few years, you find a nice girl like Ona and you marry, or get together, as they say, and you have children, that’s that, the will can be redone with no worries.”
I couldn’t get over my astonishment.
“Are you saying that if I marry and have children you’ll leave me more inheritance?”
My mother always managed to disconcert me. Did she think that with that completely useless argument, she could make me change my life? The labyrinth of her thoughts was an absolute jumble.
“Of course! Do you think that I of all people would be so unfair as to discriminate against my grandchildren from one son in favor of those from the other? Never! For me they would all be completely equal! How could you think such a thing? Arnau, please! It’s like you don’t know your mother, son!”
We hadn’t even been talking for five minutes and I was already dizzy and had a terrible pain in the pit of my stomach.
“Come with me, Mom,” I told her, standing and holding out a hand to her as if she were a small girl. In fact, she had only just recently turned sixty, and she was very well preserved, much better than Dr. Torrent, for example, who, with that white hair, looked old; my mother, thanks to the gym, plastic surgery, and dye, looked barely fifty.
“Where are we going?” she asked, as she stood to follow me.
“To the kitchen. I’m going to make myself some tea and you will have a glass of hot milk.”
“Skim!”
“Of course. And after,” I whispered, moving through the hall, taking her by the hand, “you will go to bed and let me work, okay?”
She let out a happy little laugh (she loved it when Daniel and I treated her like that) and docilely allowed herself to be led, without saying a word.
I gave thanks to Viracocha when I saw her drink the milk without saying another word and give me a quick kiss on the cheek before vanishing again into the half-light. It was five thirty on Sunday morning. I felt tempted to go out into the garden and contemplate the sky, but Guamán Poma was waiting for me and there wasn’t much night left ahead of me. I couldn’t go to bed without knowing a little more.
When my mother went back to bed, the system erased the images from the cameras in her room from the wall screen. Knowing that daytime could come without me noticing, I told the computer to let me know when it was seven o’clock and asked it for information about the
progress of the search for Daniel’s password. The response was projected on the giant wall screen, as well as on the three monitors I had distributed throughout the study: the password must be a chain longer than six digits, since no shorter combination had worked. I typed a couple of orders to get a screenshot of the process and check to see what kind of sequences the system was testing at that moment. Some fifty seven-character words appeared on a black background, alternating capital with lower-case letters, numbers, spaces, and special characters (exclamation points, parenthesis, hyphens, quotation marks, brackets, tildes, all sorts of punctuation, all sorts of accents, etc.). The situation got more complicated by the minute, because combinations with nine or ten characters could tie up all of the system’s resources. If the password didn’t appear soon, I would have to ask for help.
I swiveled the seat, and, pulling hard with both hands on the desk that held the books, I slid up to it, skating on the chair’s little wheels, to keep looking at drawings, as the phrases highlighted by my brother became clearer.
The second Inca, Cinche Roca, appeared two pages after his ancestor, dressed very similarly, and, naturally, with his big ears very visible. The various lines highlighted on the adjacent page gave me some valuable information: Guamán Poma said of Ciche Roca that he had governed Cusco, and conquered all the
orejones,
and won all of Collasuyu with very few soldiers, because the Colla were very “weak and pusillanimous, useless people.” A son of this Inca, Captain Topa Amaro, “conquered, killed, and removed the eyes” of the most important Colla, and, so that there would be no doubt as to how he did it, Guamán Poma illustrated it in detail with another picture, in which the captain was shown with some large tongs in his hands, poking the eye of a poor captive, who was kneeling before him and who wore on his head a curious hat like a stylized flowerpot. So that was a Colla-Aymara! I told myself, examining him with great curiosity. The truth was, it seemed like I had known him my whole life.
About Cinche Roca Inca (the royal title came after the name), the chronicler had still more revealing facts to report. Minutely describing his clothing, Poma de Ayala said that the
awaki
of his dress, the design that could be seen in the drawing, had “three seams of
tukapu
,” or, in other words, three lines of small rectangular forms filled with marks that were very similar to those special characters on the computer.
I swiveled the seat, slid quickly to the keyboard, and did a general internet search on
tukapus
. To my disappointment, there appeared only two documents which turned out to be the same thing, one in English and one in Spanish. It was a study titled
Guamán Poma and His Illustrated Chronicles: From a Century of Scholarship to a New Era of Reading,
by Dr. Rolena Adorno, Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Yale, in the United States. The work was overwhelming due to its erudition and depth. I read it attentively, and, among many other interesting things that Dr. Adorno said about Guamán, I found a paragraph in which she referenced the work on
tukapus
by a man named Cummins, who insisted that the chronicler revealed very little about the secret meaning of those abstract textile designs and even less about the encoded secret of, for example, the abacus that appeared in the drawing of the
khipukamayuq
, the Inca secretary who kept track of the
khipus
that recorded dynastic and statistical information. To understand that the
khipus
were the
quipus
, which is to say, the cords with knots that Ona told me about in the hospital, wasn’t too hard; I was already getting used to seeing the same word written a million different ways, but it took me a little longer to notice that the
khipukamayuq
was the
quipucamayoc
that my sister-in-law had also told me about. That idea brought me, obviously, to another similar one: if
khipus
could be
quipus
and
khipukamayuq
could be
quipucamayoq
, why couldn’t the
tukapus
, or rather, the little boxes full of little symbols that
appeared on textiles, be
tucapus
or
tucapos
or
tocapus
? Nevertheless, when I did the search on the first option, there only appeared a few documents of little use, and the second alternative gave still fewer results, so I only had the third left before giving up. But that time luck was with me: more than seventy pages had the word “
tocapus
,” and I took it for granted that one of them would explain to me why my brother was so interested (more than Rolena Adorno and that Cummins guy) in those curious Andean textile designs that seemed to have some secret meanings which Guamán Poma hadn’t wished to reveal.
Fortunately, I had barely skimmed my eyes over the titles of the first pages when I ran into a familiar name: Miccinelli, Miccinelli Documents…. Could those be the same manuscripts discovered by Dr. Torrent’s friend in a private archive in Naples, the ones that contained the
quipu
of knots that my brother was working on? Of course, there was no doubt! I clicked the link, loaded the page, and there it was: “Acts of the colloquium
Guamán Poma and Blas Valera. Andean Tradition and Colonial History:
New fields of research” by Professor Laura Laurencich-Minelli, head of the Department of Pre-Columbian Civilizations of the University of Bologna, Italy. And what did Professor Laurencich-Minelli have to say about the textiles with bands of
tocapus
? Wasn’t she in charge of the
quipus
? No, I remembered, it was Marta Torrent, and, by delegation, my brother Daniel who were in charge the
quipus
; Professor Laurencich-Minelli was studying the historical and paleographic part of the documents.
The Miccinelli Documents, discovered in the mid-eighties, were two Jesuit manuscripts,
Exsul Immeritus Blas Valera Populo Suo
(The Unjustly Banished Blas Valera to his People), and
Historia et Rudimenta Linguae Piruanorum
(History and Elements of the Peruvian Language), written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and bound in one single volume in 1737 by another Jesuit, Father Pedro de Illanes who, shortly afterward, sold it to Raimondo de Sangro, Prince of Sansevero. The ephemeral King of Spain, Amadeo I (1870-1873), of the house of Saboya, probably caused them to wind up in the possession of his grandson, the Duke Amadeo de Saboya Aosta, who gave them to Mayor Riccardo Cera, uncle of the current owner, Clara Miccinelli, in whose private archive, the Cera Archive, she herself found the documents in 1985. Part of the second manuscript,
Historia et Rudimenta Linguae Piruanorum
, was written in Lima, between 1637 and 1638, by the Italian Father Anello Oliva, who added three half-folios in which was painted the literary
quipu,
Sumac Ñusta, and folded several knotted wool cords that made up part of the same. Without a doubt, this was the
quipu
that Daniel was studying on behalf of Dr. Torrent.
The subject was serious: The documents came right out and said that Guamán Poma was the pseudonym adopted by a mestizo Jesuit named Blas Valera (writer, expert linguist on Quechua and Aymara, and historian), and that the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s
Royal Commentaries
was plagiarized from an unedited work written by Valera himself and entrusted to de la Vega during the time Valera spent on trial with the Inquisition for being the leader of a group that, apart from trying to keep the Incan culture alive, accused the Spanish of the gravest exploitation, theft, and unimaginable crimes against the Indians. But, what was even worse, the documents categorically stated that Francisco Pizarro had vanquished the last Inca, Atahualpa, not in a genuine battle, as history claims happened in Cajamarca but by poisoning his officials with muscatel wine mixed with sandarac which, apparently, was what arsenic was called back then. Professor Laurencich-Minelli accompanied each of these claims with an ample battery of cited works to prove and substantiate them, but as interesting as the subject was, what I needed were references to the enigmatic
tocapus
, not yet another handful of mysteries.